Data transfer and other communications systems will continue to require more bandwidth which will further challenge existing optical interconnect architectures. Current typical optical communications via serial or parallel optical links will not be able to sustain the higher data rates such as rates in the terabits per second (“Tb/s”). The prior art optical to electrical (“O/E”) and electrical to optical (“E/O”) conversions, when placed under the increasing bandwidth loads will dissipate a large amount of heat and make the effective thermal management much more difficult.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a new communications system which better facilitates high bandwidth data transfers.